Allow user-created plugins to use built-in code_envs

natejgardner

The built-in plugin development interface in Dataiku is quite powerful and convenient. It makes developing simple plugins quite easy, but has one pain point in my experience: dependency management. Plugins require the administrator to manually install dependencies or configure an environment. However, Dataiku users often define code_envs elsewhere in the app. It would be wonderful if plugins could simply reference an existing code_env for the plugin code to execute within so users could directly develop plugins without admin intervention. The Dataiku docs already allude to this as a possibility, but in practice, it seems that there's no way to configure it (or if there is, it's a hidden config option in json rather than something that can be selected in the UI). Ideally, there's just a code_env selection component in the UI on the setup page for plugins. This should reduce admin workload and streamline the creation of small plugins.

Related: it would be nice to set plugin permissions by group so that the list stays relevant to each user.

AshleyW

Thanks for your idea, @natejgardner

Your idea meets the criteria for submission, we'll reach out should we require more information.

In general, the idea is to have a unique code env for each plugin since they may each contain a different set of packages or package versions to make management easier from a compatibility standpoint. If the code envs are identical, it would be useful and efficient for this to be shared across a group of plugin and would also reduce an admin's workload.

If you’re reading this and would love to see people be able to use existing code envs for the plugins they're developing, be sure to kudos the original post.

Take care,

Ashley